by John Brooker | Mar 10, 2015 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
“If you’re trying to achieve, there will be ROADBLOCKS. I’ve had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” Michael Jordan, Basketball Player Sometimes you must overcome your own obstacles to creativity… Fresh back from holiday in Cornwall, I ran a Flexible Thinking course. At the end of a very successful course I reviewed the feedback from participants. One had written that I should not demonstrate the creative technique “Super Heroes” in the course because there was no way he could use it with senior managers in his organisation. “Super Heroes” (which I mentioned in the last blog) is a technique in which you get people to adopt the persona of a super hero e.g. Spiderman and consider the challenge from their perspective. For example on the challenge of improving company communication – “I’m Spiderman [adopts the pose] and I fire my web. That makes me think of all the .cc emails that fly around this office to cover back sides. What if we set the system up to fire back an automated response from every person copied on the email? That would fill up the in boxes of the guilty parties and deter them…” I just made that up but I hope it gives you an idea (I quite like it actually!) It may be that the senior managers in his organisation might take a personal affront at being asked to adopt a super hero persona or feel it...
